THL Toolbox > Tibetan Scripts, Fonts & Related Issues
Tibetan Scripts, Fonts & Related Issues
Any serious use of Tibetan fonts in computers must use "Unicode" fonts. Unicode, or the Universal Character Set, is the global standard for representing the world's scripts in a computing context. Thus our documentation is all focused on Tibetan Unicode - fonts, keyboards, and so forth. Though scholarly work around the development of Tibetan Unicode predates the release of Microsoft Vista for nearly a decade, Windows Vista was the first mass-market operating system providing built-in support for Tibetan Unicode giving it a kick-start into the world-wide stage. Shortly after the release of Vista, Apple followed suit by including Tibetan Unicode based fonts and keyboard methods in the Leopard release of the Macintosh OSX operating system. Users of various Linux distributions have built-in support for Unicode Tibetan even earlier. Unicode is thus now the standard for Tibetan computing. For details on older, non-Unicode systems, please consult Legacy Tibetan Font Systems.
Although one of Unicode's great benefits is that you can use documents across the major computing platforms - Windows, Macintosh, Linux - the specifics of support, input methods, and other aspects are often specific to the operating system. Thus we provide summary pages for each of the world's three major operating systems below - if you are new to Tibetan computing, choose your operating system and start there:
- Using Tibetan in Macintoshes
- Using Tibetan in Linux
- Using Tibetan in Windows
- A New Chapter in Tibetan Computing: an introduction to Tibetan Unicode and its use in Microsoft Vista
- A New Chapter in Tibetan Computing - in Tibetan
- Using Dzongkha in Windows (National Library of Bhutan)
The full list of pages:
Tibetan Encoding
- Table of Tibetan Characters in the UCS
- Encoding model of the Tibetan script in the UCS
- Documentation of Tibetan Script Glyph by Glyph
- Tibetan Character Encoding Proposals
Tibetan Fonts
Tibetan Input methods
- Tibetan Input System Principles
- Tibetan Input Tools for Linux
- Tibetan Input Tools for Macintosh
- Tibetan Input Tools for Windows
- Tibetan Input Tools for Browsers or Cross-Platform
Tibetan Rendering
Tibetan Converters
Tibetan Collation (Sorting)
Tibetan Software
- Software Support for Tibetan in Windows
- Software Support for Tibetan in Macintoshes
- Software Support for Tibetan in Linux
- Software Support for Tibetan in Browser or Cross Platform Apps
Tibetan Transliteration / Transcription
Platform Specific Instructions
Windows
- Using Tibetan in Windows
- Working With Tibetan Unicode in Windows XP
- Using Dzongkha in Windows (National Library of Bhutan)
Linux
Macintosh
Miscellaneous
- Making Web Pages in Tibetan Unicode
- Instant Messaging in Tibetan Unicode
- Troubleshooting Problems with Tibetan Unicode
- How to use this Worksite for Tibetan script work
For Developers
- Rendering Tibetan Properly In Mixed Text Environments
- Unicode Tibetan for Developers Only
- Getting Tibetan Unicode to Work with Server-Side Java Apps